Many different types of electronic devices, such as mobile phones, cellular phones, smartphones, personal computers, laptop personal computers, portable computers, tablet computers, and the like, commonly include browser applications and email applications. While operating with these types of applications the electronic device typically accepts data from a user, such as via typing entered using a keyboard or keypad. The user may identify during data entry, for example, a website or an email address, by using uniform resource locator (URL) domain data in at least a part of the web site domain name or part of the email address, typed into the device.
Users commonly visit websites on different domains requiring different top-level domain extensions when typing URLs using a browser. The default “.com” key on some keyboards is only useful for accessing commercial URLs, e.g., domain names having the top-level domain extension “.com”. Users often type the full URL, including the top-level domain extension, every time a website is identified to visit using a browser. In similar fashion, email addresses often include at least a portion of a URL that includes a top-level domain extension. To reduce the tedious typing of all the URL information, some electronic devices allow a user to select a menu item identifying various choices of either entire URLs or domain extensions, to assist in the tedious data entry typing task.
As illustrated in FIG. 1, a conventional user interface 102 includes a keyboard 106 and a data entry display field 104 that are presented to the user of the electronic device. While a user types on individual keys or buttons in the keyboard 106, the character associated with the particular key of the keyboard 106 that is typed by the user is displayed in the entry display field 104. A group of keys 108 in the keyboard 106 can be individually selected by typing on the particular key in the user interface 102. The symbol or numeric 123 key 110 can cause a change of the displayed group of keys 108 to show alternative characters, such as symbols, numbers, or alpha characters in the group of keys 108 as shown in FIG. 1. A space bar 112 is typed to enter a space character as necessary. A period character 114 is available to be entered by typing the corresponding key 114. A return character 116 is entered by typing into the corresponding key 116. Lastly, a fixed top-level domain extension “.com” can be entered by typing the corresponding domain extension key 118. In this way, URL data can be typed by a user by typing in the keyboard 106 which results in the URL data being displayed in the data entry display field 104 in the user interface 102.
If a user wants to enter a domain extension other than “.com”, the user may press a button or type on a particular key to cause a pull down menu to display alternative choices of domain names or domain extensions. These choices are typically fixed and/or pre-configured in the device. The user then selects from the menu one of the available choices or the user has to return to the data entry on the keyboard 106 and type the full URL including the domain extension.
Especially in wireless communication devices, such as mobile phones, tablet computers, and the like, where the user interface 102 is particularly small due to the size constraints of the device, the typing of additional characters in a URL, such as a domain extension, adds data entry burden to the user of the device.